Just like ignoring your intuition, Gavin says the way women are conditioned to be nice all the time can lead them into dangerous situations. "The fact is that men, at core, are afraid that women will laugh at them. And women, at core, are afraid that men will kill them."

This conditioning and fear, Gavin says, lead many women to try to be nice to people whose very presence makes them fearful and uncomfortable. They often believe that being mean increases risk, he says, when in fact the opposite is true.

"It's when you're nice that you open up and give information, that you engage with someone you don't want to talk to," he says. "I have not heard of one case in my entire career where someone was raped or murdered because they weren't nice. In other words, that's not the thing that motivates rape and murder. But I've heard of many, many cases where someone was victimized because they were open to the continued conversation with someone they didn't feel good about talking to."